I'm experiencing pretty severe crashes with OpenBSD5.4-current. Without direct cause the system totally freezes. The NumLock LED doesn't even respond anymore. Also the three finger salute, no help there even though I changed the setting to do a clean shutdown on ctrlaltdel.

Reason why I'm thinking it's got something to do with -current is that I've used the exact same hardware on Linux and OpenBSD5.3 before without issues. (I switched to -current to get my video card working properly)

There is always one constant when it happens. I'm copying either from or to an "alien" filesystems with midnight commander. First two crashes in the beginning of the week was reading ext2, writing FFS2, now it's reading FFS2 writing msdos. (sd3a to wd0i in case you want to look at dmesg)

My expectations for -current is to be stable enough to use as a desktop computer. I can live with an occational crash every half a year or maybe even a bit more. But doing a fsck on large disks every few days is not a funny experience

Are there other logs I can supply except the output of dmesg?

[UPDATE]

And whilst writing this my computer is rebooting and going through fsck again because it completely crashed again... . So that's #4 this week.

I was copying a couple of directories with mc, and it was ready so I marked the next few directories to be copied onto an msdos formatted disk. The process lasted for less than a second. It copied a few files, then the system froze up, completely... . The only button/keypresses the computer reacted to, was the hardware-reset button.

Next time, I'll only use one tty on console without X running, without tmux running, just a bare mc session, if it still crashes, I'll just issue a cp command.
[/UPDATE]

My expectations for -current is to be stable enough to use as a desktop computer.

I've always run OpenBSD -current (5.3) as dekstop .. no issues.
With the big move from 5.3 to 5.4 I'd rather you wait for the upcoming 5.4 release .. then you smoothly go '5.4 -current' .. I suppose so.

Got some more information now. I rebooted the computer. Got through the fsck (also the msdos disk). I mounted the disk without errors, then launched mc and the moment I pressed enter on the directory the disk was mounted on, the system froze up completely again but now I could take a picture of the output, I typed it here:

1. Your system is entering the ddb(4) kernel debugger upon panic. When X is in use, the panic cannot be seen, and the system appears to "freeze". You can type ddb commands, however you will have to do so blindly.
2. The crash(8) man page will help, also.

Setting the sysctl ddb.panic=0 will prevent the system from entering ddb(4) when a panic occurs. This is helpful for X users.

If you want to find out why the problem is occuring, the system will need a suffuciently large swap space to dump RAM to in the event of a panic, and your system will need sufficient freespace to store the dump from swap into /var/crash after RAM is saved to swap and the system reboot.

Since you can reproduce this panic at will, I recommend doing so once ddb.panic=0, and then following the guidance in crash(8) to obtain a backtrace and a list of the active processes, so that you can provide a full report the problem (with your dmesg) to the Project on the misc@ mailing list.

[facepalm]
I've got a sneaking suspicion I know why this was happening. I was -running current but not being fully aware about how -current works and what to do and certainly what NOT to do.

I guess I have installed OpenBSD from a snapshot CD and probably after a new snapshot was realeased I installed mc with $PKG_PATH set to pub/OpenBSD/snapshots/packages/amd64. My attention was drawn when I even got "bad major" errors trying to install packages. The difference with my snapshot and the online ftp-mirrors was getting too big.

Yesterday I updated properly, and I'm having no more luck reproducing the error. So I'm guessing this is one is down to me ... .
[/facepalm]

I was -running current but not being fully aware about how -current works and what to do and certainly what NOT to do.

Well, since you are a OpenBSD beginner, you'd better not try too much.
You should start to learn OpenBSD from a stable release before trying something harder, like a current release.
And if you still encounter problems with another device, remember : "Do the best with what you have".
Also, remember that OpenBSD works pretty well in shell mode...

Quote:

Originally Posted by virtuvoos

Yesterday I updated properly, and I'm having no more luck reproducing the error. So I'm guessing this is one is down to me ...

And you'd better follow daemonfowl's advice, and wait the upcoming stable release, which will be published in few days :

Quote:

Originally Posted by daemonfowl

With the big move from 5.3 to 5.4 I'd rather you wait for the upcoming 5.4 release